Colombo Court Blog The Hotel
Fourteen things you might not know about Colombo Court
The tree is made of bicycles, the fountain was a cement mixer and the bar stools were tractor seats. A list for the curious, from the lobby ceiling to the bedside lamps.
Guests often ask what a particular object in the hotel used to be. The answer is nearly always something. Here are fourteen of them.
1. The tree in the lobby is made of bicycles. An araliya tree grew on that spot and could not be saved when the buildings were converted. The sculptor Prageeth Manohansa was asked to replace it, and welded a new one from bicycle frames and chains. It rises three floors to the glass roof.
2. The birds are scrap metal too. They are all over the hotel. The largest, in the garden, is called Timothy.
3. The lobby ceiling is railway sleepers, some of them more than a hundred years old.
4. The floors were walls. The bricks underfoot in the lobby and the library came from the boundary walls of the old buildings.
5. The bamboo is doing a job. The walls of living bamboo screen the hotel from the road, divide the garden and give the private courtyards their privacy, without a brick being laid.
6. The fountain was a cement mixer. It was left on the site by the builders and is still turning, in a manner of speaking, in the private courtyard.
7. The trees are older than the hotel. Several by the pool are sixty to ninety years old. The building was designed around them.
8. The bar stools were tractor seats. In The Loft, where the sofas and tables are scrap metal and reclaimed wood.
9. The lamps by every bed are bicycle parts. Look at the base.
10. The chandeliers are paper. On the room floors and in the Scarlet Room, the shades are made from paper, and so are some of the chairs in the library, which are stronger than they look.
11. The library still has someone else’s magazines. One of the buildings was a family home, and a shelf of their old National Geographics stayed.
12. No two rooms are the same shape. Thirty-one rooms, fifteen of them suites, each fitted into a building that was never meant to be a hotel. Returning guests ask for a different one each time.
13. The hotel needs no air-conditioning in its public spaces. The private courtyards and the garden do the cooling, which is part of why it became South Asia’s first CarbonNeutral® city hotel.
14. The therapists are Balinese. The Court Spa specialises in Balinese treatments, and the hot stone massage is the one they are known for.
If you would like to see any of it for yourself, the rooms are here, and the team will happily walk you round.
